Ministers have halved the number of badgers they hope will be culled this
year, following reports that marksmen were falling woefully behind official
targets.

The bar for two pilot programmes has been lowered from 5,000 badgers killed to just over 2,500, as one cull in Somerset drew to a close and the second, in Gloucestershire, entered its final stages

But officials are considering applying for an extension to each cull of up to three weeks after marksmen admitted they are still set to miss the new, lower target by at least 10 per cent.

Sources at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the adjusted targets reflected new information about the size of the badger population.

But activists claimed accused the government of overseeing an "utter shambles" and called for ministers to stop the cull immediately rather than applying for an extension.

Contractors had initially been asked to cull 2,100 badgers in Somerset as part of a pilot project aimed at preventing the spread of tuberculosis to cattle, but just 850 had been shot when the cull license expired yesterday.

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Now the target has been lowered to 1,020 badgers, giving contractors a realistic chance of meeting the benchmark if the culling period is extended by two to three weeks.

A similar situation is believed to be occurring in Gloucestershire, where planned cull rates have been lowered from almost 3,000 to 1,650.

Defra sources claimed the initial figures were based on estimates of badger population size from 2012, and that a new analysis suggests numbers declined significantly during the harsh winter meaning fewer needed to be shot.

"The Somerset pilot finished on Sunday and appears to have been successful," they said. "We set a high target of 70 per cent of the estimated badger population. The cull has succeeded in culling just shy of 60 per cent of the estimated population.

"This outcome should deliver clear disease benefits as part of a four year cull, but Natural England are considering an application for a short extension to improve these benefits even further in year one of the four year pilot cull."

But opponents of the cull warned that the failure to meet even the new target meant that tuberculosis among cattle could now become even worse.

Experts have previously warned that failing to meet the 70 per cent target could result in more transmission of the disease to cattle, not less, because it will disperse badgers over a wider area.

Wendy Higgins, of Humane Society International, said: "The whole thing has been a disaster from start to finish. This will be the third time they have revised the badger population figures.

"If the cull had been carried out on the 2012 estimates, they could have wiped out the entire population. And according to these figures, winter has been more successful at reducing badger numbers than Defra."

The two pilot culls were launched earlier this year and are set to run for six weeks annually over a four-year period, with a view to carrying out similar trials at 10 more sites.

The aim is to determine whether shooting free-running badgers, rather than trapping and killing them, can kill enough to lower transmission of TB to cattle, and be conducted humanely.